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This Is Me--2019 A to Z Theme

The Challenge of 2019 was the 10th! Since this was kind of a milestone year for A to Z my theme was a retrospective of sorts, looking at my 10 years as a blogger as well as ruminations about my life as it is and as I hope it yet can be. I've got places to be and people to see along the way. Hope you'll join me for this part of my journey...

Always a work in progress--welcome to my blog.

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Monday, December 12, 2011

How To Blog Better: An Interview with Blogging Guru Mitch Mitchell

Today my special guest is blogger extraordinaire Mitch Mitchell. I've been following Mitch's blog I'm Just Sharing for over a year now and have found it to be not only entertaining, but also extremely helpful and informative. Mitch stays on top of the news about social media so he's become one of my go-to guys to help me get educated about the subject.

I asked Mitch to join me here on Tossing It Out to provide a sample of what he does on his blog and give my readers a mini-lesson on becoming better bloggers.

I always enjoy reading your blog, Mitch. My audience at Tossing It Out is varied, but I think most of us are interested in how to blog better. You provide good insight to things we might want to consider in relation to our blogs. Today I'd like to ask a few questions that I think might be helpful to my readers:

Arlee: Writers are often told that they should have a platform that includes a blog. What should writers be most focused on when it comes to blogging?

Mitch: All bloggers should realize that the purpose of blogging is one of these 3 things: inform, educate or entertain. Once you get past that then the thing to focus on, in my opinion, is honesty. I see so many posts that look just like what someone else wrote, and in my mind it's not honest and the person didn't really give anything of themselves. In essence, they're being phony and dishonest in their presentation. One can let others learn a lot about them without giving up everything, and when we make people comfortable, they respond positively. And who doesn't want more positivity in their lives?

Arlee: Time is limited and greatly limited for many of us. How do you recommend that bloggers get the most bang for their buck when it comes to blogging activity?

Mitch: If you have problems with time but still want to blog, I recommend scheduling the time to blog into your calendar. Even one post a week will give your blog some benefit and if your content is appealing, people won't mind that kind of schedule, even if they're clamoring for more. Schedule an hour a week, if you need that long to put a post together, even if it's over the weekend, and get it done if you really care about blogging to begin with.

Arlee: Can you tell us the nutshell version about SEO (search engine optimization) and why it should be important to us? Is it important to all of us and how do we determine this?

Mitch: SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's the process of setting one's website up in a way that encourages search engines to come on a regular basis to determine what it is you do so that you can compete online with others that do what you do. You can get a brief lesson on it here: http://www.seoxcellence.com/searchengineoptimization.html.

Its importance to blogging depends on what your purpose for blogging is. If it's business then it's really important to think about SEO; if not, it should still be on your mind, but your first consideration should be your writing. Actually writing should always be your first consideration since that's what helps to set you apart from everyone else. You can check out this link to tell you what the 3 most important parts of SEO are: http://www.seoxcellence.com/blog/a-websites-first-3-seo-tips/

Arlee: Recently on your blog you've been talking about alternate media approaches such as video blogging, podcasting, etc. Who should consider doing this? Why would we want to do this? How do you recommend a person get their feet wet without a big investment in equipment?

Mitch: There are a number of people who are more comfortable speaking than writing and have a message they want to convey to others. Those are the people I'd recommend to at least look into doing this type of thing, though it comes with limitations, such as the fact that there's no real way to do SEO for either of them and, for people like me who speed read, it can slow us down to the point where, if there are too many videos or podcasts, I might decide to skip a lot of them. As far as a recommendation based on price I bought my webcam in December and only spent $35 for it. Sure, it's limited to staying on top of my monitor, but it gets the job done. I believe a camera that's a bit more mobile can still be purchased for less than $100. Very few of us need to buy really expensive equipment to get going unless you're looking to do some really fancy stuff with it. Video is a nice way to add something new here and there to your blog as well.

Arlee:Why would writers and others want to read your blog?

Mitch: I talk about blogging often and writing here and there as well. However, I think people might like to read my blog because I try to be conversational and a storyteller, no matter what it is I'm talking about. You never know what I'll say or how I'll say it, and it's not a bad technique. Those who are interested in styles of writing might be interested in how I go about it, and if they look at some of the comments will possibly see other posts they might enjoy as well. It's a safe place for all, even if a topic might be deemed controversial. Luckily, I'm rarely that; or am I? :-)

Controversial sometimes, but he's always nice about it. My thanks to Mitch Mitchell for this teaser about what awaits on his blog. I strongly encourage you to check it out and subscribe if it looks like a place you will want to revisit. I'm there often and after you've stopped in I think you might be too.

Excellent advice! We need to be ourselves on our blog.Hot topic right now. Anne R. Allen just posted blogging tips for writers yesterday and I'm doing a guest spot in a week on the same subject. We all want to blog better.

This is an extremely informative and interesting interview, Mitch seems to be a very intelligent man and I'm assuming his content will match how he comes across in this interview so I'll need to check his stuff out. I honestly learned a lot from reading this so thanks very much Arlee.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being all three, and I'm not sure he meant to suggest that they were mutually exclusive, surely? Information and education are almost the same thing, and they're both more fun when they're entertaining as well.

thanks to all who have visited and commented so far. I hope Mitch will be able to drop in later to say hello. But a few specific responses from me:

Cal Lass -- You and me both. You should go for it, but I recommend keeping them relatively short unless you are doing something like a class or something. Can you imagine if we all started doing 15 minute or more media content posts!

Pat -- What you are doing is pretty unique, at least I haven't seen anyone else doing like you're doing it.

L.Diane -- This would be a natural for you and I think you should go for it. You were mentioning the other day about your content issues. Doing a video post now and then might be an answer to that.

Kelly -- You're right. I light to learn and be informed, but for gosh sakes keep me interested. Makes me think back on the differences between the boring professors in college and the ones who had classes I looked forward to and continued to take other classes they taught.

This is a great interview, Lee. I am now VERY interested in meeting Mitch Mitchell, and I will also be checking out the links. I've been bogged down this past week with a bad cold, but I'm so glad I got over to this post today (I'm feeling much better now). And now I'm going to check out your memoir blog! :o)

It's taken me a long time to learn about blogging, and I'm still not the greatest at it. I started out thinking it was just a matter of slapping words onto the screen and picking a nice layout. NOT! I wish I'd known about Mitch when I first started. He would have saved me a ton of frustration.

Hi, Lee!I loved what Mitch said about the purposes of blogging: inform, educate, and entertain--always with honesty.I think I would enjoy sitting down with you all, listening to your stories. Merry Christmas!

Micth, I always enjoy getting a belated comment. I don't think that many people subscribe to threads so I don't know how effective your responses might be. You could try responding here or if you've got some blocks of excess time (what a luxury) you might go visit some of there blogs to reference their questions.

Try a few as an experiment to see what happens. In the meantime I'm going to tweet the link for this post since it's always relevant and promote it on FB.

Go ahead and say something. Don't be afraid to speak your mind.I normally try to respond to all comments in the comment section so please remember to check the "Email follow-up comments" box if you want to participate in the comment conversation.

For Battle of the Bands voting the "Anonymous" commenting option has been made available though this version is the least preferred. If voting using "anonymous" please include in your comment your name (first only is okay) and city you are voting from and the reason you chose the artist you did.

If you know me and want to comment but don't want to do it here, then you can send me an email @ jacksonlee51 at aol dot com.

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A juggler of words and phrases. My main blog is Tossing It Out. The focus blog for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge can now be found at a-to-zchallenge.com where updates will be posted until the event in April begins.
Wrote By Rote is about memoir writing.
A Few Words is my Sunday contemplation blog.
A Faraway View is about dreams. Pick what you like or look at them all. I love blogging!